The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories (16 page)

But I haven’t told how we went up the pipes. No, we did no swimming, unless we took an unlucky step on the catwalks and upended into the pool. Only a trickle came from each pipe, so negligible a trickle you wouldn’t think the catch would ever fill up off it, but for it came so steady. Up we went in all directions, like ferrets after a rat, in our swaddling suits, prodding the tiddlers ahead of us if we was in an area what had a lot of tiny finicking veins to it, because a finger in the dike is one thing, but you can maneuver better if you can fit your whole fist in there.

The pipes were angled and slippery, but our suits soaked up the blood where they pressed against the walls, and we learned the way of pressing out our elbows against the walls while we brought our knees up, and our knees while we reached up ahead for a handhold. The rubbing of our shoulders and knees did most of the work of cleaning the big arteries, but when we got to the little, crooked bits, what was even too tight for the tiddlers, we got out the swabs and the tampers and the wires with bows of batting tied at the end, and we cleaned all the pokeholes. We lay snug as grubs under the city rubbing all its secret passages clean, working in the dark because we knew where the blood was just by the sticky feel of it and the smell. It wasn’t lonely work because the tunnels was like the tubes of a big ear and we could halloo to one another, and more than once someone got in trouble for a whisper or another sound, and that was the time Sally and I had our first fight due to jealousy,
which was before we ever got together, and we took it as a sign of our being destined, after which we moved in together and could not be parted.

Thank you, sir. Yes, I think that’s covered it, how we used to do the job, and I’d like it to be known that we was hardworking, and clean when at home, cleaner than many as work above in a fine office. But times move on, and the little bit of blood that still seeped up to stain the mayor’s white gloves on an opera evening was terrible irksome to him, and so the people what think things up thought up a better way to keep the blood out of London, and that was when they modernized, with pumps, and hydraulics, and deep drilling, and sandbags, and machines that crawled along pissing gluey stuff, and macadam and such, so the earth was plugged tight and the city was like a potted plant, only wet from the top. They put the cart horses to hauling garbage and they let all the swabbers go with a pension, though there was some funny business which all the girls were talking about for months about how we only worked part-time, and our days off counted against our pay like too much sick leave, which was only what we might have expected from them, who was reluctant enough to pay us even when they needed us, but I didn’t pay too much attention to it, because my Sal was sick and I couldn’t have left her anyway.

Then when she died, my heart smote me if I even glanced at the ladyholes, and I could not have gone back down there for any money, and I didn’t care if I found other work or not, because I took no joy in anything. I wasn’t even curious about the
new machines, and only gradually took note of how clean the streets were, a professional interest, you might call it. Our gang hung together though they found other work; what we had done was a bond, but I kept to myself after Sally died and after a while the girls stopped calling me over to their table, and then I changed pubs and I didn’t see them anymore.

He was a fool! And there’s no fool like a proud fool, and that’s what he was, a little turkey-cock in high heels. I laughed when I heard he wanted to build the tallest building in London. I’ll cast a shadow over Big Ben in the morning, says Mr. Strick, and the dome of St. Paul’s in the evening. Never mind that isn’t a practicality for geographical reasons. I warrant he had a coven
of lawyers working to find a loophole in the laws of nature and believed up to the last minute he would have his way. But build he would, in any event, and let the shadows fall where they might (in the end I think they fell on a rookery, which is where they usually do fall, if truth be told). Such a building he raised, tall and ugly, with no furbelows for the pigeons to perch on. Such a high building must have strong foundations. Deep foundations. I saw the pit—infernal! It struck everyone that way, even me what has spent two decades in the belly of the earth. It was arrogant to dig so low, just as it was arrogant to build so high, neither was really needful—nor lawful, I suppose, though he had money enough to pay the fines. When you’re that rich the mayor thanks you for breaking the law!

I won’t say I knew it would happen, but the building sat uneasy in my sight. I was on a knife edge anyway, for the monthly was late, and though nowadays I saw not a drop of blood from January through December I still felt when it was coming. My stomach was poorly and it made me come over strange to lean back and look up at the building. Everyone admitted it was indeed very high. All the papers said so. There was a ribbon across the door, which was cut by the little man with the pocketbook, and all his lawyers applauded. The mayor was there, waving. He and Mr. Strick went inside and waved from the big windows and everyone laughed and cheered as if they had done something clever. Then everyone went home.

That night the blood came. I sat up awake in my bed and I knew it was a heavy flow. I heard the tap dripping in the kitchen and I took it in my head that it was blood that was dripping from the tap. I got up to see but the water was clear. So I went back to bed and slept like a baby.

In the morning I heard a hubbub outside but I didn’t bother
to ask as there is always a hubbub about something or other. So it wasn’t until Big Bess knocked on my door that afternoon with a shine in her eye that I heard. I threw on a coat and clapped a cap on my head and made straight for the Strick building. I had to elbow my way through the crowd once we got in a few blocks of it, Big Bess coming along behind me holding my coattail. We could see plain enough that it was true even before we got to the square it looked over. Mr. Strick had dug too deep and struck through the protection; he had punched a hole right through the flowerpot, sir, into the living earth. And now his building was filling up with blood.

It was a beautiful sight to me, the windows solid red near up to the second floor. The glass of the windows bulged from the press of it. For most of the people there, though, it was a fearful thing. These were city folk, remember, many of them no better acquainted with mother earth than with the man in the moon, and would laugh you down for proposing that an egg comes from the hindquarters of a hen. They don’t know blood for the natural thing it is, and I heard mutterings that there was something devilish in the whole business, that if it was not some villainous plan of Mr. Strick’s then it was his punishment. Which was true enough, in its way.

The blood lapped at the ceiling of the first floor and it was looking for the way to the second. I had no doubt it would find it. It was rising in the tower like mercury in a glass, and there were many stories to go, and the heaviest flow would come tomorrow. For the first time in years I felt like talking. “Come for a pint, Big Bess,” says I, and off we went to a pub.

That was where you found me, sir, some hours later, and perhaps slightly the worse for wear, for I believe I was singing one of the old carols, with Big Bess roaring along, and I must
have been in my cups to do that. So I ask your pardon if I was too hearty with you.

At first I was none too sure I wanted the job. It struck me as both pleasing and just that Mr. Strick had himself a towering monument to something even bigger than his opinion of himself: the fat old unstoppable earth. But when it was pointed out to me that with a week to go before the flow died down, the tower couldn’t contain all of it, even if the windows held, which was unlikely, I changed my views, because that much blood would drown the whole neighborhood, while Mr. Strick though humiliated would be high and dry, and that was no kind of justice. And maybe it pleased me to be needed again.

Without Bess I couldn’t have found the others. But Bess is a natural meddler. Let a stranger come into her pub, she will know his business and give him three pieces of good advice how to do it better before she is through shaking his hand. That’s how she is. So she knew where everyone was, swabbers and tiddlers, or knew someone who knew.

You know it very well, for you came along with us, but I’ll tell it for the sake of the story, how we went all over town in a hired hansom, very grand for the likes of me, tramping up stairs and knocking on doors and sticking our heads into pubs, and it would have made me come over philosophical if we had not been so busy, to see so many familiar faces, but all carrying more of a burden. I would have liked to fetch the old cart horses, too, who were so steady, and knew their job, and didn’t spook at the smell of blood, but they was old and spavined now if they still lived. I don’t know how long a horse lives, but they was not young horses even back in the old days. So Bess dug up a motley team of horses from all walks of life. Some was in the
grocery business, some in laundry, some in hauling, and one was a glossy show horse whose owner owed Bess a favor.

Bess found a failed hospital-linen supplier and by linen I mean the cheapest cotton sheets, a warehouse full, what were suffering from the damp and apparently much admired by rats and cats for their absorbent qualities. The smell on them might inspire a consumptive to rise from his deathbed and seek more congenial quarters in the gutter. But they suited our purposes well enough and the manufacturer, a shiny little red-faced man, got even redder and shinier, and had to blow his nose on a sheet. That was nearer than I would have liked to bring my organ of smell to one of them, but he wanted to show his gratitude.

We loaded the moldy sheets on three carts and also took aboard two peddlers Bess took a liking to. They was each half blind and consequently had thrown their lots together, figuring on making one proper man between them. Threading a needle would have taxed their abilities, but they professed themselves keenly interested in knotting one sheet to another, dog collars being not much in demand that day, and that task they performed well enough. We was fashioning a big tampon, you see, bunching and tying the looped sheets to a towrope, a bit like making a paper rose.

By the time we brought the tampon to the building, there was more carts and horses and a sizable crowd of swabbers assembled. It was astonishing how many of us, myself included, had kept our old sanitaries. Only sentiment could account for it, as napkin coats were hardly the latest thing, as could be proved by the frankly astonished looks of the gawpers. Those as didn’t have sanitaries had thrown on heaps of old nightgowns
all on top of each other, by which—from how they had matching pink collars and cuffs—I surmised another failed businessman would have a bit of meat to throw in the pot tonight, thanks to Big Bess. It was a beautiful sight in the blue light of evening, the company all got up in white gowns, like we was going off to bed.

We hooked on our lanterns and went up the ladders the firemen had put up to the walls, what were just long enough to reach above the blood level, though not to reach the roof where there might have been a door. I personally knocked in the first window and I must confess I enjoyed it. The room was beautifully appointed and the glass crunched and sparkled on the floor, but I was mostly struck by the smell of blood, which was strong and old and weakened my legs and brought the feeling of Sally close at hand. I felt I’d see her behind me if I turned around, and I was weak enough to try it, but there was only a young woman in too many nightgowns stepping through the window like a stout angel. Like almost everyone there she looked a little familiar and that only made me miss Sally the more. If they was still alive, why wasn’t she?

I forgot all that in towing the tampon up. It was monstrous heavy and we didn’t have the reel to take up the slack and keep us from losing the ground we gained. We just ganged up on the rope and pulled and pulled until the corridor was full and we was backed up all the way to the stairwell. That was all right, though, because we figured down the stairwell was the only way to thread the tampon through the building. We was in luck that it was the grand spiral kind what has a sizable hole down the middle.

Once we got the tampon in there wasn’t much to do for a
while. We let the tampon down gradual like we used to, and while the sheets wicked up the flow we sat around on Mr. Strick’s furniture, feeling precious silly in our sanitaries, and shy with one another. But as soon as the first floor drained far enough, we trooped down. It was a curious sight, the noble oak tables with blood washing around their turned legs, the stained paintings flopping out of their frames. In blood up to our boot tops, we set to work. You might think it would be easy to swab down a room what is basically a box, but you’d not be reckoning with molded plaster ceilings—cupids and drapery in one room, fleur-de-lys in another, and seashells the length of the hall. Wiping cupid’s bum and dabbing blood clots out of roses is fiddly work and not exactly in my line. We made our own decisions on what was needful and if the occasional secretary pulled open a drawer and found it full of blood in weeks to come, well, just say we wasn’t accustomed to office work. The plaster never did lose its pink tinge.